Notes and Queries, Number 15, February 9, 1850 eBook

“This English version is the same
in substance with the Latin, though I confess, ’tis
not so properly a translation, as a new composition
upon the same ground, there being several additional
chapters in it, and several new moulded.”

The following are examples of corrections being adopted:
P. 6. Latin ed. “Quod abunde probabitur
in principio libri secundi.” For the last
word subsequentis is substituted, and the English
has following. P. 35. “Hippolitus”
is added to the authorities in the MS.; and in the
English, p. 36., “Anastasius Sinaiti, S. Gaudentius,
Q. Julius Hilarius, Isidorus Hispalensis, and Cassiodorus,”
are inserted after Lactantius, in both. P. 37.
“Johannes Damascenus” is added after St.
Augustin in both. P. 180. a clause is added which
seems to have suggested the sentence beginning, “Thus
we have discharged our promise,” &c. But,
on the other hand, in p. 8. the allusion to the “Orphics,”
which is struck out in the Latin, is retained in the
English; and in the latter there is no notice taken
of “Empedocles,” which is inserted in the
margin of the Latin. In p. 11. “Ratio
naturalis” is personified, and governs the verb
vidit, which is repeated several times.
This is changed by the corrector into vidimus; but
in the English passage, though varying much from the
Latin, the personification is retained. In p.
58., “Dion Cassius” is corrected to “Xiphilinus;”
but the mistake is preserved in the English version.

JOHN JEBB.

* * * *
*

SHAKSPEARE’S EMPLOYMENT OF MONOSYLLABLES.

I offer the following flim-flam to the examination
of your readers, all of whom are, I presume, more
or less, readers of Shakspeare, and far better qualified
than I am to “anatomize” his writings,
and “see what bred about his heart.”

I start with the proposition that the language of
passion is almost invariably broken and abrupt, and
the deduction that I wish to draw from this proposition,
and the passages that I am about to quote is, that—­Shakspeare
on more than one occasion advisedly used monosyllables,
and monosyllables only, when he wished to express
violent and overwhelming mental emotion, ex. gratia:—­

Lear. “Thou know’st
the first time that we smell the air,
We wawl, and cry:—­I will preach
to thee; mark me.

[Gloster. “Alack!
alack the day!]

Lear. “When we
are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools,—­This
a good block?”
—­King Lear,
Act IV. Sc. 6.

In this passage [I bracket Gloster] we find no fewer
than forty-two monosyllables following each
other consecutively. Again,